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INTERVIEW WITH FRANK GRAMLICH
BY THOMAS GOETTEL MAY 23, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: It is May 23, 2000, and we are sitting in Readfield, Maine with Frank
Gramlich. Frank retired in 1982 as the Wildlife Assistant Supervisor in Augusta, Maine.
Maybe you could just tell me Frank, how you got into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. GRAMLICH: I retired from the military in 1959. Before I retired I had already
talked to the people in the Biology department at the University of Maine. When I went
into the Army I was 19, and I retired as a Major. But the thing is, I didn’t have any
education. I had one year of High School. I always wanted to be a soldier, and go
places. I enlisted before the war in 1939. I wanted to go to the Philippines, as far away
as I could. And they said, “Well, on your first enlistment, you have to go where we send
you. You are going to Hawaii”. I didn’t think that was too bad for a first enlistment. I
learned to “soldier” in Hawaii. We were all soldiers there, and being in the service, the
rest of the people were civilians, they didn’t count. We were elitists. I left Hawaii two
weeks for the “Japs” bombed it, and the war started.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: The fact is, that when the “Japs” were bombing Pearl Harbor, I was
in jail in Salinas, California.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GRAMLICH: It was one of our Saturday nights. Me and my buddy Rich, and
another soldier that came back from Hawaii with me, we just went to Salinas. We were
stationed at Fort Ord. The cops said, “Come with me”. And we said, “What are we
doing?” We had had a few drinks, but we were sober and were getting ready to go back
to the base. He pulled a gun out, and marched us in. There was a guy standing at the
desk there, and he says, “Oh, it looks like you got them!” They took our prints, “bing,
bing, bing,” and luckily the next morning, they said, “Boy, you guys are lucky!” They
had found that they had a set of prints from somebody else that fit our description. So we
got out of jail, and found that the “Japs” had bombed Pearl Harbor! We got back to Fort
Ord, we were regular Army, and everybody else practically, at that time were draftees.
They had been drafted for a year. They were all laughing at us. It was really easy for
regular Army people to move up pretty fast. I wound up as First Sergeant when I was 21
years old. All my life I wanted to be a biologist, and work with wildlife. Since I didn’t
have any schooling or anything, I took a test to get into the University. They accepted
me, and I started. I liked it, and did great. I was on the Dean’s List all the time I was in
the bachelor program. After I graduated in 1963, I went into the master’s program.
Every summer, I went and worked for Fish and Game. The first summer, I dipped
salmon down on the Machias in Whitneyville. Then, another year I worked with Skip
Spencer on duck banding. Year after year, I went to Moosehorn. I got to know the
people in Fish and Wildlife pretty well. There was Wes Jones, and Doug was in my
class, he was a classmate of mine.
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MR. GOETTEL: Doug Mullen?
MR. GRAMLICH: Doug was quite a character. He used to have a pet wildcat, a bobcat.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard about that.
MR. GRAMLICH: He was always “gung ho”. But, I got along good with the Wildlife
people. When I got my masters, I was married and had four kids. I had my Army
retirement pension, but I thought that I would like to get a job with Fish and Wildlife. So
I applied, and the next day, they hired me.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I had to move to Great Meadows in Littleton, Massachusetts. It was
Great Meadows/Monomoy. I fought the traffic, and worked as much as I could. I kind of
enjoyed it. For Massachusetts, it’s at least a decent place, for me, with the wilderness and
all.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you the refuge manager at Great Meadows?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, and at Monomoy. I was the manager at both of them. Of
course, Bill French was up at Parker River. He had the refuge program up there. He was
my supervisor, and we got along great. One day Bill Hickling came down and wanted to
look at Monomoy and Great Meadows. I showed him around the refuges. Bill Hickling
was still with Wildlife Services. Tom Horne was the chief of refuges at the time and he
didn’t want to go with Tom. But he was Tom Horne. He wanted the rocks to be painted
and the fenced fixed. He was more interested in the latrines and stuff, than he was in
wildlife. But he was all right. I liked Tom. Everybody got along good with Tom. But
Bill Hickling came down, and we went down to Monomoy, it was at the end of the
summer. He said, “I might want to stay tonight”. I said, “Well, we can get you into a
hotel, no problem.” And he said, “Geez, they charge an awful lot!” I said, “It will cost
you three dollars a night!” One of the guys in the park owned a motel, and that’s what he
charged the government people.
MR. GOETELL: No kidding?
MR: GRAMLICH: He was impressed, he said, “Boy, this is great at this time of year!” I
wanted to get back up to Maine so I talked to him. And he said, “O.K., I’ll see what I can
do.” And in a little while he called, and arranged for me to transfer up to Orono, he had
offices in Orono. And Ed [unintelligible] had the place then. So I moved my family up
to Bangor. We still owned the house in Bangor, and we moved in. I got started with
Wildlife Services there, getting chipmunks and squirrels and gardens and things. It was
great, I learned a lot. In those days, you didn’t have a secretary so you had to do your
reports and stuff all by yourself. I could do twenty words a minute on the typewriter, or
something like that. But you had to spend too much time on paperwork. Then, they said,
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“Well, we want you to come to Augusta.” It was closer to Maine Fish and Game. I
worked together with them. I knew a lot of people at Maine Fish and Game because I
had worked with them summer after summer. I came and found this place. I had a friend
who was in the Army with me; he was one of my Lieutenants, while I was a Captain in
charge of him. He says, “Hey, there’s a place right up here that’s for sale. You might
like it.” I looked at it. This place is two hundred years old.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: This part is new, but we spend more time in here.
MR. GOETTEL: It’s nice and light.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was built in 1790 something. Way back. Anyhow, I looked in the
front window, and said, “I’ll take it.” I paid sixteen thousand, and it came with twenty-two
acres. We bought it, and put a roof on, and other things that it needed. But anyhow,
when I got to Augusta, I got very close with the commissioners of the Fish and Game and
we had a good relationship. We move into the Federal Building. We used to have an
office right next to Fish and Game out on Sewell Street. But they moved me into the
Federal Building. I moved in there with two Federal wardens, U. S. Fish and Wildlife
wardens. They were great, but we didn’t have any secretary. The thing is, we had to
have a girl. It was such a better job, having a good secretary. Me, and Dave Sealy, we
chose a secretary. There was one nice blonde girl who came in. She had some
references. This other girl worked for the IRS part-time, and she wanted a full-time job.
She was in the hospital, having a baby. We talked to the Chief of the IRS, and he said,
“Well, if you get her, you’ve got a good girl, she really works.” So we hired her while
she was in the hospital having a baby.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We never saw her. She came in and we were pleasantly surprised.
She said she was halfway married, and she and her almost husband had two kids and she
had just had another. She was a jewel. We had her for sixteen or seventeen years. She
just handled everything. She handled the phone and all the paperwork.
MR. GOETTEL: Her name was Kathy what now?
MR. GRAMLICH: Kathleen Chapman.
MR. GOETTEL: Chapman. That’s right, I remember her.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. I gave her everything I could, you know. She was a “6” I
guess. I couldn’t get her higher than a “6. She deserved more!
MR. GOETTEL: Oh yeah, they all do.
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MR. GRAMLICH: She and her husband have a horse-riding academy down here. She
got me interested in horses again. We used to have them when I was in the service
[military]. We inherited three Hungarian cavalry mounts.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Lieutenant Henley retired, well, he didn’t retire, he went home. And
when he went home, I took over his mounts. And for years I had them. When we got
married, we lived on the Continental Divide, close to [unintelligible] and I had a big
prison camp, Moramar, that I was in charge of. I used to have one of the prisoners take
care of my horses. He would saddle me up, and I would ride home at night. It was
probably three or four miles to where I was staying with my wife.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: In the morning, I would ride back.
MR. GOETTEL: What was the name of the prison camp again?
MR. GRAMLICH: I can’t remember. It was a big prison camp. We had soldiers in it,
German soldiers. They hadn’t released them yet. The Nuremberg Trials were still going
on. Anyhow, I was a second lieutenant. I really loved my horses a lot, and learned to
ride. During the day, I used to canter around a little bit. There was a building on the
outside of the barbed wire fence, and there was a grassy area about twenty feet wide,
between the fence and the building. I was cantering along between the fence and the
building, and all of a sudden there was a jeep! It was going in the gate to the camp. They
didn’t stop or anything, and I had to pull back! I still remember those guys’ faces!
[Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you were going to say that it was Eisenhower or something in
the jeep!
MR. GRAMLICH: No, but those guys can remember still!
MR. GOETTEL: So when you were working here in Maine, you worked a lot with
Eagles. How did you get involved with Eagles?
MR. GRAMLICH: I remember exactly how I got involved with Eagles because I got in
close fairly close with the chief of Audubon. The President was Dick Anderson. He says
to me, “Goddammit, Gramlich, people are killing our Eagles! You are a Federal boy, and
I want you to do something about it!” I was getting dead and wounded Eagles all of the
time. I said, “O.K., let’s do something. His idea was to start an education program for
people, tell them about Eagles and protecting them. We had thirty-three nests in Maine
then. This was not a lot, compared to now. I talked to Mel Coles up at the University and
told him that I thought we ought to have somebody from the University here. Maybe we
could start a joint Eagle program. He got Bucky Owen to work with me on Eagles. We
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needed to protect the nesting sites. And we started a program of landowner agreements
that would govern utilization around the sites, and keep them as far away from the
Eagle’s nests as possible. We also had articles published in the paper to educate people
about eagles. Pretty soon we weren’t seeing as many dead or wounded Eagles. There
was an Indian trapper, up on Indian Island who shot an Eagle one time. And I raised hell
with the Chief. We got a letter from an Indian kid, who lived up on Indian Island. It
said, “I am an Indian, and I was up on the river the other day, and saw an Eagle flying,
my whole being changed then. I could remember my ancestors. I really love Eagles!”
This was from a little kid! Then, we weren’t getting good production. We knew we had
thirty-three nests, but thought, ‘where the hell is the production?’ They weren’t
producing young. I hired this kid, Bob Baugh, and we looked at some eggs. He was a
“monkey”, a tree climber. He was great, because it was kind of tough, getting to an Eagle
nest. There were a lot of dead branches and stuff, and it was hard to get in. But he would
go like a monkey. He was careful and he never hurt himself. He never fell. We took
some eggs and sent them to Patuxent. I forget who was the chemist at Patuxent, but we
worked very closely.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Lucille Stickell?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I wasn’t her, but maybe it was her boss. We started getting
Wildlife Journals and stuff. He was great. He said “Well, this has got too much DDT”.
We wanted to increase production, and we said, “If those eggs are no good, let’s get some
eggs from some other places. Who the hell is going to give us an Eagle egg?” Some
people from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois said, “We got some nests, and we can
take an egg from a few nests and give them to you”. We sent a suitcase. [Asking
himself] Who the hell was the Fish and Wildlife guy who used to bring them in a little
egg box?
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Paul Nickerson maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, Paul Nickerson. He was a good guy. Any time when we put an
egg in a nest, why, we’d have somebody from television there to show it. They would
[Eagles] produce and we’d band the young, and the whole works. Then we decided after
a while to try not just eggs, but young eagles. We placed young ones in the nests. We
wondered what would happen. We didn’t know for sure if they’d accept the young ones.
It might be hard with the young ones up there squeaking while “you” [an Eagle] were
trying to work the nest. I think it was down in Washington County where we put a young
one in a nest. We had already taken the eggs out. And he was up there going “Squeak,
squeak”, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. But the Eagle answered back.
The eggs we had taken out were failed eggs. We were down on the ground and we
wondered, “What are you going to do”? And she flew right down and sat on the nest, and
they went “beak, beak” and they were bonding right away! It was great!
One other time, we put a young one in a nest, and it was close to an Osprey nest. The
Eagles and Osprey were having interaction, fighting each other, and all that stuff. We put
one in, and that Eagle flew down grabbed that young one and flew away {killing it]. He
probably thought that it was an Osprey. He didn’t recognize it as an Eagle.
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MR. GOETTEL: Aw, that’s too bad!
MR. GRAMLICH: As far as I know, that was the only one we lost.
MR. GOETTEL: Well that really turned the Eagles around, because I know there’s what,
two hundred nests now? Something like that?
MR: GRAMLICH: Yeah, and there was winter-feeding and stuff like that you know.
We could take carcasses off the roads or highways, and set up feeding stations. We
would check and see how many banded ones came in.
MR. GOETTEL: Where did you have the feeding stations?
MR. GRAMLICH: Mostly down east around Penobscot Bay. That was my biggest thing
that I accomplished was working with Eagles. But I had lots of help you know from
everyone. And help from the State. And since I was involved personally, it really made
me feel great. That was my fun job, working with the Bald Eagles. Another thing was
that we had Dr. Everhart. He was the Fishery man up at the University. He said,
”Gramlich, we’re having trouble, we’ve got this big hatchery here in Maine, and we’re
taking the Salmon, and taking the eggs and raising the smelts, and we put them in the
river, and we’re not getting results from it. Now we are tagged them, and we want to see
results from the tags”. He said, “We think there may be some relation between smelts,
and Cormorants.” He told me he wanted me to go down and see what I could find out.
Down in Whitneyville, I had a couple of truckloads of smelts. They weighed an eighth of
a pound. They were good-sized smelts. I put a couple thousand into the Machias River.
The next morning I went out and shot a Cormorant. I opened him up and there was fifty-five
tags [in the bird’s stomach].
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I said, “Holy, Christ! I have an idea now what’s happening”!
MR. GOETTEL: I guess that now you know where they are going!
MR. GRAMLICH: The great breeding island was Old Man Island, down off of Cutland.
It was just one hundred yards from the house that I owned down in Cutland. It was a
hundred yards to the water, and about a half a mile as the crow flies. I was out there and
there was all those young Cormorants. There was a lot of tags that had been regurgitated
by the adults and the young ones would eat those tags. You could pick up hundreds of
tags there. This had to be the end of the Cormorants. We tried a lot of things, but we
wanted to get rid of them fast. I wore myself out every day shooting them with a
shotgun.
MR. GOETTEL: So did you get rid of the colony down there then?
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MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. There used to be trees on it. And they built their nests into the
trees. The Cormorant droppings killed the trees and they went down. The trees were all
snags then. The birds would build their nests on the stumps or on the bare ground on the
rocks. I persecuted them for, oh, I don’t know, five or six years, but after that, there
weren’t any more Cormorants on the island. We broke the eggs and poisoned the nests,
but we had to shoot most of them. We would go there in the morning and stay all day.
“Bang, bang, and kill about one hundred Cormorants in one day.
MR. GOETTEL: You worked a lot on Seagulls too, didn’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah, I also worked to protect Puffins, and Terns. Once we got
chemicals that was the big thing. What do they use know? I can’t think of what we used
then.
MR: GOETTEL: That would be “13-39”.
MR. GRAMLICH: We used to call it something else.
MR. GOETTEL: Starlecide, maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, that’s it. We did the work with Dr. Wolfe, from the
manufacturer. He was a chemist. We were trying to use it to inhibit the reproduction in
pigeons, and other birds, and kill them. We went out and feed them, and feed them.
Then we when out and trapped hundreds of pigeons, we would dye them and release
them and follow the nesting. It kind of worked pretty decent. There was goddamn little
production from the nests. But we started finding a lot of dead pigeons too. We learned
that it was a lethal agent and it worked pretty damned good.
MR. GOETTEL: I never heard that. No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We used it for everything. Dr. Wolfe would come down and we
would go over and look. Things happen when you’re doing something like that. When
you have them marked, and have flocks of brilliant red pigeons you can find out where
they were feeding. You can trap them there. You don’t know whether they are from
downtown, sitting on the Sears building. But you release them, and go downtown, and
there they are sitting on the Sears building. So you know that those are the ones that
were feeding out at the railroad station. We did a hell of a lot of work on pigeon, gull,
and Cormorant control. Those were the big ones.
MR. GOETTEL: I think you worked with Bill Drury out on Betinicus Rock was that and
maybe Carl Buchiester too?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: I think that was some of the first gull control.
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MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. The whole while we used it. We used Bill Snow’s boat. Bill
Snow was the federal warden. He didn’t really approve of it, but he went along with it.
He didn’t tell us that it wasn’t a good idea. I’d go down and get, I don’t know how many
loads of stale bread. I would cut it up and mix “13-39” with margarine do it wouldn’t
dissolve in the water too much. I made sandwiches. On Saturday and Sunday we would
take a lot of these sandwiches out there, and at a table we would say, “Here, gully-gully!”
and “whoosh” they would come and get them. After a while we would get so many gulls,
the fishermen would start to raise hell. They wanted to know if we wanted to kill all of
the gulls. But we said, “No, just around these certain islands”. They were upset by it.
It was nice being with Bill Snow. He was a typical warden. He came in one morning
and told us that he would be gone for the day because there had been a death in his
family. “I’ll see you in a day or two.” Then Kathy came in, and we told her “Bill won’t
be in today, he had a death in the family”. She said, “Family? What family has he got?
The only family that he has is his wife!” It was a Monday morning. She got a newspaper
and it was his wife who had died. He never said that it was her.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no! No kidding!
MR. GRAMLICH: Anyhow, we went to the service. And Bill took two days off. But he
was Bill Snow, that’s all. He was a good warden, I thought.
MR. GOETTEL: He lives around here somewhere doesn’t he?
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, he was born in a house just a few miles over from here. But I
don’t know where Bill is now. I have seen him.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought he was still around here somewhere.
MR GRAMLICH: He might be somewhere down around the coast somewhere but I
don’t have the slightest idea.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you born in Maine?
MR. GRAMLICH: No.
MR. GOETTEL: Where were you born?
MR. GRAMLICH: In New York, Long Island city.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, no kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We moved when I was a little kid. We moved out to around
Commack, Long Island. I went to school out there. I used to duck hunt on Long Island
Sound. We hunted rabbits all the time, cottontails. I almost killed a deer with an axe one
time, it was so tame, but it was illegal. Before I went into the service, I was working as a
laborer. We were building a road. We were building a road to a camp. The Germans
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were making a Nazi camp. It was before the war, and they were building a camp so that
the Germans would come. We always thought that they were Nazis. We called them
Nazis because they talked German all of the time. And they were. There was a lot of
Germans in that area. We were working and someone said, “Look, there’s a deer coming
out of the woods”! I had an axe, and I thought I’d see how close I could get. I walked up
to it, the deer was right there. [Demonstrating] If I had had the axe in the right position, I
could have killed it! I used to drive a tractor for the boss. Gus Sigschwartz was his
name. It’s amazing the memories that come back! We knew exactly where he lived in
Commack. He lived next to a brothel. Gus had a red headed wife. But rumor had it that
whenever the brothel owner needed an extra girl, he would get Gus’ wife! We all
believed it, but I don’t know.
MR. GOETTEL: You said you were in jail in Salinas. How did you get from there to
Germany?
MR. GRAMLICH: I was artillery, and we had old, French “75s”. I was a gunner,
corporal, and then gunner sergeant in just a short time because I had couple of years of
service. I was in the 7th Division. We went to the desert and had desert maneuvers. We
were getting ready to go to North Africa to take care of Rommel. But they called us
back. They said they needed some troops, and some non-commissioned officers to form
a new division down in Mississippi. I was told that they felt that I was a good gunner and
a good artillery section chief. They also told me, “We’re going to send you as chief of
guns, or staff sergeant to Mississippi. I went down to Mississippi, and had to report in. I
was single at this time. A bunch of officers were cooking for themselves, and they said,
“Boy are we glad to see you”! They wanted someone to cook for them and stuff. I
happened to have a thirty-day leave coming up, and I said I would be back in three days.
I was on a detail that had to go up to the railroad tracks about fifty miles away to meet the
troop trains coming in. They brought in the draftees. They drafted mostly boys from
Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, and New York state boys. And they had all these big
“fool” uniforms that they carried. They were told, “You’re going to go to Camp Van
Dorn and learn to be a soldier”. Me, and my crew, I had two or three guys, we’d go in
and we’d carry a bunch of brooms and dustpans, and stuff. We would hear, “Oh look,
there’s a Sergeant, he’d going to clean up”! We’d start sweeping them up. We would
march them into where we had to bring them. That was fun. When the training was
finished I made first Sergeant, I was probably twenty=one when I was first Sergeant. I
took them overseas when we got orders, and I was their first sergeant. They still call me
“Sarge” even though I was later an officer whenever I see them. But we got right into the
“crap”. We did the Battle of the Bulge, and Cologne Plains and Remagen Bridgehead. I
got wounded about three days after we crossed the bridge at Remagen. It wasn’t too bad,
but I got airlifted to a hospital in Paris. The 60th General was a regular civilian hospital,
but the Army took it over. I was in the Officers ward. A nurse came in and told me “this
was General Rommel’s bed.” [Meaning that Mr. Gramlich was in the same bed as
Rommel had been in] He got wounded when he was on the Western Front. A plane
dropped a bomb kind of close, and he was wounded, but not too seriously. He went in
and stayed in the hospital for a month before he went back to Germany.
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MR. GOETTEL: So you were in the Battle of the Bulge? Boy, that was quite a battle,
huh?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: Was that in 1944?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, late 1944. It was the eighteenth of December. I was a first
sergeant, but I knew the Colonel pretty well. He had watched us get ready for overseas.
We had to take forced marches, you know? They were like twenty-five mile hikes. I’d
try to keep the guys together. They would start to lag after twenty-five miles. There
would be some big Corporal lagging behind and I would push him and say, “Hey! Get up
there, keep up!” And kick him in the ass. My officer pulled me aside and said, “You
know, you’re not supposed to do that, but it is effective”! He called me in on the
eighteenth of December and said, “Gramlich, I know you’ve been in the Artillery for a
long time, and you know I’m going to send you up as a forward observer. All of our
forward observers have been killed. And I want you to go up. The Infantry has been
pretty well shot to hell but I’m going to put you in with this Combat Engineer Battalion
on top of [unintelligible place name] Ridge, it’s a hot spot. And I want you to go up there
and see what you can do.” The snow was up to your ass then. He said, “Get a radio
operator and a jeep and get up there. Here’s a map, and here’s what I want you to do.”
Oh boy, the battle was ragging! There were goddamned “star shells” all over. We started
off at night, it was dark and we could hear tanks, but weren’t sure whose tanks they were.
Three of us went up to find the engineers, and we didn’t know where the hell we were
going or where we’d end up. I said, “Let’s not waste our energy”. So we camped out in
the snow. We overcoats on, and we laid in a pile. In the morning somebody was coming
down the hill and I said, “Hey, you know where the engineers are”? “Yeah, right up
there!” I was new to this forward observer stuff because I wasn’t an officer and had
never been a forward observer before. But, I could adjust fire because I used to run a
sand table for the officers. They would shoot a round of big BBs into the sand table.
They would give the commands as though it was land. It was a training thing, and I ran
the site just like it would be for real. I knew a lot about it. I reported to the Colonel, and
he said, “Well, find a place where you can see, you’ve not a nice place here with a big
field down below”. I went as far as the outpost. One of the guys I took with me was a
radio operator who had been with the forward observers before. We found a nice big
hole, up to here, {showing depth] but I could see good. But then I said, “Oh, Jesus
Christ!” The whole field started turning into Germans! “Here they come! Press, fire
mission, fire mission, Infantry in the open!” I yelled into the radio! Over the radio, I
heard Germans yelling orders. The Germans had jammed our radios, you see, but they
probably didn’t know we had a little switch that you could change channels with. You
could get it back again. We got it open again [the radio] and the fire direction officer
says, “We’ve got new fuses for you. They are variable time fuses, and all the artillery
battalions have them. We’re going to give you time fuses. You don’t have to adjust, just
get the rounds out there!” Here they come! “Fire for affect! And fire upon request!”
And “Boom, Boom!” Those things were busting all over. There were guys out in the
open, and that stuff was spreading real good. Boy, people started dying, and what was
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left of them was heading back into the woods. And “Pres” says, “You know? We better
get the hell back into our lines” because we were pretty well exposed there. He was
right! We got up to the top of the hill, and the engineers said, “Oh Christ, you did a great
job!” One sergeant told us to take his hole, because he had to deliver some ammunition
to his men. He said, “You guys get in the hole”. We got in the hole, and it felt pretty
good. A guy came up and said, “Gramlich, Gramlich?” And I said, “Here!” And he
said, “I’m going to relieve you, they sent me up to relieve you”! In reply, I said, “Get
your ass in the hole for Christ’s sake”! There was a tank right there shooting. He said,
“Get me a bazooka”! But I told him to get his ass in the hole or he was going to get is ass
shot off. The Lieutenant had a bazooka, and he said, “Gimme that!” He was going to
blow up the tank with it. He had to cover fifty yards. He got down on one knee and
fired. “Vroom”! You the see that the rocket went out and hit the tank, and glanced off,
and the tank said, “Oh, there must be somebody shooting at us!” [Laughing] He came
back by yelling, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” We called for a medic, and he went toward the medic.
He was sitting on a hole, and blood was coming out of his field jacket and the medic
came over to help him. He was unbuttoning his jacket and the tank said, “Boom!” And
blew the both of them to pieces. He got a Silver Star.
MR. GOETTEL: So you were fifty yards from the tank?!
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah!
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Then I started to adjust on one tank, and I got one right close to
them, but you can’t fire a lot of ammunition because you’ve got your own people in there
too. You could only fire one round at a time. “Boom”, and you realize that you’ve got a
short one. I added ten yards, and went over them. The tank would realize what we were
doing, and would back off and get down in the “draw”. I knew the coordinates for the
“draw” good. I said, “Fire in the draw!” And we put a bunch of fire on top of them. We
could see the smoke come up and the explosions going off. The other tanks were
shooting all goddamned day! They told me later that I had like eighty-four guns firing
for me. I killed about twelve tanks. Then that night, there was an infantry attack. I had a
machine gun right there. This bastard came towards me. They were shooting like hell
and there was hollering all around. I had my hole that the sergeant gave me and I always
carried a carbine and of course my pistol. I saw this bastard coming and he was firing an
automatic weapon. The muzzle blasts lit him up so I could see him good, and I put one
right in his heart, just about. He was gone. We stopped that attack, but it was bad. In the
morning, I went out to look at “my German”. He was an officer. He had on a
paratrooper, camouflage helmet. We were looking at him and a tank fired. He was far
enough down so he could see us moving. We damned near got whacked! But that was
war. When I got back they said, “We’re going to make you a second Lieutenant!” My
old first sergeant said, “Gramlich, don’t let them do it to you! They either make you
chicken-shit, or they’ll get you killed!” I told him that I thought my mother would like it.
None of that is Fish and Wildlife. We’ve talked about as far away from first coming into
the Fish and Wildlife as we could get. I enjoyed that as much as Fish and Wildlife.
12
MR. GOETTEL: The Battle of the Bulge was several months long wasn’t in?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. I think it was three months long. We left position on the 31st.
We were busting the Seigfried Line with the old Mageino Line that the French had, and
the Germans had taken. We’d pick a company of infantry and attack it with artillery.
We’d take one bunker a day. And try to take another the next day. We tried to make it
so that their bunkers couldn’t support each other, because they had big guns. It was kind
of tough, and people got killed pretty fast. There were a lot of casualties. Other things
happened too. Marlene Dietrich came over with, oh what’s the name of that: They had
shows for the soldiers?
MR. GOETTEL: The U.S.O.?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. All of a sudden, we realized, “ Jesus, if she ever got captured,
it would be her ass!”
MR. GOETTEL: Oh man!
MR. GRAMLICH: We were supposed to have show coming up in the next week, but
things were too “hot”, so they moved her back to Paris. Even then, when we moved into
that one position from Belgium, and moved into position on the Rhine, when we got there
we thought it looked like a good place to put the guns. A whole herd of deer came
through the lines. They were nice deer. They were big, red deer. They came across the
front of our lines, and they opened up with their “ack-ack” on the deer, trying to get one.
Our own “ack-ack” damn near killed us! The Germans were shooting buzz bombs. The
“V-1s”. You could see them up in the sky, and when they stopped, “Boom!” They were
like a thousand pounds, and it felt like the floor falling out underneath. I was in [town
name] next to a church. I had to relieve myself. I had to take a “crap”, and sat down next
to the church. I heard a buzz bomb and cleared out. It hit the other side of the church
and I almost got buried in those clay shingles.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? Holy smokes!
MR. GRAMLICH: Things like that were going on all of the time. When our guns would
fire, and of course, as we fired the Germans could pick up where we were. They gave us
a hell of a time in the Artillery. We had a lot of incoming as well as our stuff going out.
That was kind of tough, but we were dug in. The captain said, “I want everybody dug
in!” I went around and checked to see if everybody was dug in. Everybody had good
overhead covering and everything. We were in pretty good shape. We had a hell of a
show with all the stuff coming in. After the shelling stopped, and nobody was hurt, I said
to the captain, “It doesn’t look like it hit anything”. And he said, “You’re full of shit,
sergeant”! The officers had a tent. It was stupid to be in a tent, instead of being dug in,
and there was a big hole in the side of the tent. I said, “Oh, well that’s tough”! They told
me to set up a roadblock. They had had a truck shot out from in front of them. We had a
couple of fifty caliber machine guns. I had six myself. I took those extra three machine
13
guns and dug a hole. I had to use my ammunition section beside the roadblock. All of a
sudden that colonel said, “We’ve got to stay until we’re overrun. That’s the last work I
got from battalion”. I thought, “Oh, that’s nice”! They [The Germans] had tanks and
everything. A little while later I see a captain zooming by in a jeep! He says, “I’m going
to Battalion, I don’t know when I’ll be back”! I thought, “You chicken-shit bastard,
you’re bugging out!” But he did. And he went to plead with the colonel not to let our
guys get killed. He wanted them to let us move back a little. But still, it was pretty
convenient for him to be back there. I had a pretty good field of fire where I had my
machine guns set up. And I had a box of grenades. I knew we couldn’t stand up against
a tank. I looked down and it was all gray. They were moving, [The Germans]. They
were running, and some of them weren’t carrying weapons. There wasn’t anything
between them and us except for about one hundred yards. I said, “O.K. boys, this looks
like it’s it. Let’s take as many of them sons of bitches with us as we can. Wait ‘til they
get in real close and we can get a bunch of them right off”. Once we started shooting,
they would get a tank and blow our asses off. They were coming and coming, and the
phone rang. We had a field phone from Battalion, down to the guns. The operator came
on, and told us to move back. The colonel had decided that it would be better if we
moved back. I said “there’s no sense in us dying here. Let’s get out asses out, while we
can”. We grabbed the machine guns and went to the truck. It was on the other side of the
hill, so they couldn’t see the truck. We took small arms and went down. They were
hitting the town that we had to go through real bad with artillery. We couldn’t go far
because there were so many trucks smashed up in front of us. We got out and there was a
stonewall around a cemetery. I thought that this would be a good place to lie down.
There were a couple of guys lying there and I got on top of those guys, up against the
rocks. After the incoming stopped, I got up. I realized then, that two of the guys were
dead. There was so much stuff there, that I hadn’t realized it. We moved back to another
place. And it was touch and go. We had to be lucky to get through that shit!
I have been in touch with one of my sergeants who was there. And one of my buddies,
who was my radio operator, he just died last year. They are all going fast. There is this
one Indian kid in California. He’s still left. I just sent my letter in yesterday, or day
before yesterday, for the reunion. It’s going to be in Philadelphia. I said, “I am too
stupid, I can’t come. Good Luck!”
MR. GOETTEL: That’s too bad.
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, I’m not doing much these days!
MR. GOETTEL: That’s all right, that’s all right. You were in the Korean War too
weren’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah. In the cold war, after Korea, I was up in the Artic, up in
northern Greenland. I got a battlefield promotion to Captain. I was a battery commander
the whole time I was in Korea. The first day we got into Korea at Pusan they put us next
to a brook that was about as twice as big as my driveway. There was a big rice patty.
The all kinds of stuff was going up. I didn’t like it so I told the guys to dig in. I said, “I
want everything dug in as fast as you can!” Just about everyone was dug in good, and
14
here, the shit started. There was massive machine gun fire. When I first went to Korea
the [unintelligible] was four guns. We had four “105s”. They changed it. They wanted
each battery to have six guns. So they gave me two guns and they gave me fifteen
Koreans. They just picked them off the street. They were ROK soldiers, but they
weren’t trained or anything, but they were part of my troops. We were in one fight where
we were next to a dike, and when the firing started, I looked at my first lieutenant and he
couldn’t stand up. I ran over to the machine gun. There were bullets bouncing off the
goddamn shield of the gun, “bing, bing”. I looked in one hole, and there were two
Koreans. They looked about “this” big down in the hole. They had a nice M-1 rifle
sticking up and two bandoliers of ammunition. I grabbed the rifles and told them to give
me the ammunition. I put it in and started firing at the flash of the machine gun. I shot
about a bandolier of ammunition. Of course the machine gun answered. But I think I
might have stopped them. I thought it was not a good sign that they would fire at us like
that, when we had the big guns. I called the sergeant out of a hole, I said to him, “Let’s
get a guy to load ammunition. I’ll take the sights and you take elevation”. We got on
that gun, and every time a saw a flash out there, why, “Boom!” We were shooting a
thirty-three pound projectile at them. When it was over we hauled six truckloads of
bodies away. I lost two guys, killed, and one guy went to “pieces”. He couldn’t stand it.
He had one of my machine guns. The colonel came up and said, “Get rid of that guy, that
will spread through the whole outfit”! They took our battery commander to headquarters.
We called him “cautious Charlie” anyway. And they made me the battery commander.
They gave me a Bronze Star. And I used the Koreans, oh, jesus, did I use them! One of
them was a Korean Lieutenant, Kim Sung Yu. He was like my brother after a while. He
taught me everything about Korea, and was my interpreter. He went to school in Tokyo
at National University, and studied politics. He didn’t have his degree but he was smart.
He was the biggest help, and a good buddy. He went through the war and made it out
O.K. I had him, and I could control my Koreans through him. I would give them leave,
so they could see their families, and they would all come back and find the outfit. I never
had any of them go “awol” or anything. They were O.K. We went to Yalu and watched
the Chinese cross that goddamned bridge. We were the last outfit to leave Pyongyang.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. We had to stay until the infantry got out. And the infantry got
out. The big thing about combat was that you were tired all of the time. Exhausted.
You would go for three or four days without getting any good sleep. And the weather,
with the rain, and snow was bad. I got malaria, and I got down to one hundred and
twenty pounds. I was skin and bones. My Korean said, “You are sick”. I was eating GI
rations all of the time. He wanted to fix me up, so he took some grenades and went out
fishing. He got some nice catfish, and fixed me up some nice fried catfish. He said,
“Here, this will make you feel better”. And I thought it was great! I can remember that
[his combat experiences] better than I can remember the Fish and Wildlife. There’s a lot
of memories in here. [Looking at a scrapbook] This one says, September 1966, that
would be the time I was at Monomoy working with the Eagles. Here is a check that I
wrote to Barnstable Treasurer “patrol Monomoy, waterfowl census.” Now why would I
write a check to Barnstable Treasurer?
15
MR. GOETTEL: Might it be the revenue sharing check?
MR. GRAMLICH: Might be. [Reading] “Patrolled about eighteen cars today. Visitors
have been on the refuge today. [Unintelligible] have been frozen, attempt at opening by
unknown person.” This is the 6th of December. Saturday the 25th, “Off duty”! I wonder
why! Here’s a preparation of a narrative report, on the 22nd, and a draft of a Sea Duck
study. One thing I did there was, we worked on banding Eiders. We also trapped Eiders.
We watched how they came ashore. We would use decoys, and they would come to the
decoys. They would walk right up, and you might have twenty=five or thirty Eiders in a
trap. It worked pretty damned decent. We were out on the bay in a twenty-eight foot
boat. It was one of the Massachusetts Game vessels. There was a bad weather warning,
but we were out. The seas came up, and it was a really big storm. I thought we were
really going to get finished on the water. The lights went out all through Massachusetts.
It was one of the worst storms ever, but we were out on the water. We should have
noticed from the Coast Guard that we shouldn’t have gone.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, from the storm warning. Did you have law enforcement
authority when you patrolled? Did you carry a gun?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I had a pistol, a K-22, but that was for “popping” things. I
didn’t carry it around except when I needed it. I used to shoot Cormorants and stuff like
that on the nest with it. [Looking at papers again, reading portions of them].
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get onto the Eiders coming up on the beach? They
normally wouldn’t do that. How did you do that?
MR. GRAMLICH: If you watch a flock of Eiders out in the water, you might see one
come up on the sandy shore.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh really? I’ve never seen them do that!
MR. GRAMLICH: Then, all of a sudden, a whole bunch will come out of the water. I
went to Monomoy with a guy from Parker River, Donnie Grover. He was a good guy.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah he was real good guy.
MR. GRAMLICH: There was another guy, a biologist, I can’t think of his name.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Bill Forward?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, Bill Forward. He was a neat guy to work with.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you ever work with Jim Vanwheilden? He was the agent down in
Massachusetts when I was down there.
16
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh, I’ve met him.
MR. GOETTEL: I don’t know where he is now.
MR. GRAMLICH: When I came here, Dave Sealy was the agent. We got along good
with Sealy. And who was the Italian guy? He had an Italian name. They used to raise
hell with Bill Snow. Bill Snow was a stickler for discipline and stuff. There wasn’t
anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t up to Bill’s standards.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Bill Cardoza maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Cardoza, yeah! He was a good buddy of mine. In fact, they were all
good guys.
MR. GOETTEL: I think Dick Stot retired.
MR. GRAMLICH: Is he retired?
MR. GOETTEL: I think it was a year or so ago.
MR. GRAMLICH: I went duck hunting with Donnie Mariss. I don’t know if you know
Donnie.
MR. GOETTEL: The entomologist, right?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah! When I went to school, I knew the director. And I asked him,
“Do you know who is the best biologist in Maine”? He says, “Who”? And I told him it
was Donnie Mariss. I said, “Christ, he’s good on everything”! He was a fishery biologist
and he knew a lot about everything, insects, and everything. He was the entomologist for
the state here. And he was a great birder. All he does now, it go look at birds. He’s
retired now, and he goes to South America, and Europe and Great Britain just to look at
birds. He’s really a birder. Donnie helped me a lot. He’s a good guy, and knows what
the hell he’s doing. He lives over in Belgrave.
[Reading out loud]
“Light dusting of snow on window during the night. About forty percent of impounded
area ice covered. Particularly lower ponds. Moved files to Bedford office. Meeting with
Don Chase”. Did you know Don Chase?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, he was one of the realty guys.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. “Sunday: Off duty”. [reading] I wasn’t a workaholic but if
something needed to be done, I did it! Christ, I wish I could understand my writing!
[still looking through scrapbook, finding an item he remembers] In 1968, when I didn’t
have a girl, before we had Kathy, we had the Job Corps. I said we could get a Job Corps
girl for nothing. It would cost the government anything. We got a girl from half way
down the state Poland Springs. She came from a Job Corps camp there. And she came to
17
work, and she came with a book she was going to read. Then there was a big, black, ball
player. She was really enamored with that guy. He was her idle. We asked her, “Can
you type”? “Yes, I can type.” “Peck, peck, peck” she was really slow. “Well, will you
type this up”? “Peck, peck, peck”. There were a lot of corrections. In the afternoon, I
said, “Will you type this”? She says, “Two letters in one day?” Somebody came in one
day, I think it was one of the enforcement guys, and she was lying on the floor taking a
nap.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GRAMLICH: We had an office above two real estate offices. Real Estate, and
Insurance. I went down stairs one day, and said. “Have you seen my secretary?” They
said, “Secretary? That’s not a secretary, for crying out loud!” I finally had to tell her,
“Sorry”.
MR GOETTEL: It just wasn’t working out.
MR. GRAMLICH: No it wasn’t working out. The best thing she could think of was, “If
you come down to the place, I can get you on. You might see somebody that you like”.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh geez! You were involved in fighting Pittson Refinery up there in
Eastport quite a bit weren’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes! I told you that didn’t I?
MR. GOETTEL: You were the expert testimony I guess, for Eagles.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was supposed to be me, and Buckey. We got to the meeting and it
seemed like there must have been fifteen lawyers! There was probably about six, or
seven, or eight, and they had their papers spread all over. They put Dr. Buckey in a room
where he couldn’t hear anything, and interviewed me for six goddamned hours straight.
I did the best I could, fighting those bastards. They made me so mad. They would be
asking me stuff and wanted me to “answer yes or no”. How the hell could I answer
”yes” or “no”? It’s too complicated. It’s a wildfire, one-way, or the other. They asked
me all kinds of goddamned stuff. “Did you write this?” “Yes, I wrote that. Sure, and I
meant what I said too!” The judge wasn’t any better. He says “You’re supposed to
answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’’. After six hours, they said, “O.K. you can sit down”. They bring
Buckey in and they ask him questions about the Eagles in Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick. He was up on that topic, I wasn’t. They didn’t get too much off of him.
That night driving home from Boston, I had an attack of pain in my face. It was from the
trigeminal neuralgia. I would be in a store, shopping or somewhere, and “Bam”! I
would hit all of a sudden. People would think I was having a heart attack. They wanted
to know where my medicine was, or wanted to take me to the doctor. I but knew that I
would be all right, and that it would go away.
MR. GOETTEL: So you never knew when it was coming?
18
MR. GRAMLICH: No, I never knew when it was coming. It was just random. It would
happen pretty often when I was driving. I would have to pull over. I was afraid that I
would have an accident. Then I started going to the neurologists. They said they could
take the nerve out completely, but we can’t trust that, because sometimes the pain is
worse, and more continuous. I felt that was too dangerous, if you can’t get relief. I had
surgeries about every three months. And after a while the doctor told me that he had
done everything that he could, and that I should try a Dr. Davis. Dr. Davis had a different
procedure that he did, and it worked for about three months. The he said “I’ve done
everything that I can do. Try Dr. Steag, down in Boston.” I went there and he did a
surgery where they put a plate in between the nerve ending and the pain center of the
brain. That lasted about six months! He gave me Tegritall [a medication]. Which is
hard on your liver, and stuff. I had to take blood tests every week, because I was taking it
like hell. The doctor told me not to take more than I had to, to keep the pain down. He
finally said that he couldn’t do anything else for me. But he told me that there was a
“hell of a good” neurologist who had just come in to Maine. She’s from Germany, and
she had taught in Colorado. She is as smart as a whip. She knew what it was all about.
She asked me what I was taking. I told her I was trying to keep it down to fifty
milligrams a day. And she told me that I needed at least two hundred milligrams! She
put me on a really heavy dose of it. Since then, it’s been better.
MR. GOETTEL: Do you figure that all of this is due to the tension at the Pittson
testimony?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, I had never had it before then. All of the doctors were
interested in my case. One guy, a Dr. Steag, wanted me to explain my symptoms to a
group of other doctors, and they all said that they were characteristic. And everybody
kind of [cringed] when you talk about that kind of pain, you do it unconsciously, even
when you are just talking about it.
MR. GOETTEL: But you beat the Refinery though, I guess.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. But the thing is, the Regional Director, Larson, was there
during the hearings and he told me that he thought that they treated me miserably, but
that I did a good job. After I got back here, they told me that they were going to give me
a bronze, Fish and Wildlife medal.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? That’s great!
MR. GRAMLICH: It was in the paper and everything. It took a lot out of me. But I can
stand most anything now, as far as pain goes!
MR. GOETTEL: Did you try acupuncture or anything like that?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, I tried acupuncture. I tried everything. You had those needles
in your toes, and your hands, and your face. I kind of liked it. It felt kind of good. The
Chinese woman who gave it to me was a Doctor. She’d put one needle here, and another
19
needle there and then she’d hook up an electric charge to the needles. It felt so good
when the charge went through. It kind of eased the pain. I liked that a lot. But it was
expensive. I spent quite a few hundred dollars on it. It was one hundred dollars a
treatment. It’s only money. But it [The pain] always came back. The treatment was only
temporary. It would make it feel good for a couple of hours. I keep a record of the
money I have to spend by paying for everything with my VISA card. It averages out to
over five hundred dollars a month, just for the pharmacy. This month it was six hundred
and twenty-five dollars.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: That’s all my spare change! It’s six hundred and some odd dollars
that I would otherwise be paying for a few days in a “home” somewhere. Oh Christ!
But that whole experience made me feel good about the Fish and Wildlife Service. And
it made me hate lawyers a little more than I always hated them.
MR. GOETTEL: That’s a funny thing about Maine: Of course, I worked here for ten
years at [unintelligible] but I always felt that one person could have a real affect on
conservation in Maine. You always felt like you were really doing something, that you
had the ability to so something.
MR. GRAMLICH: You had the respect from people, from the State people.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you know Jim Darsol? Is he still around?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah, he is still around.
MR. GOETTEL: He was a real character.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, he was. I saw a lot of his Duck boxes.
MR. GOETTEL: We were always lucky to have good relationships with the State here.
If nothing else, it was always positive.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. The State was always the same. We were always working
together. Guys like Ken Anderson, who died recently.
MR. GOETTEL: Did he really. I didn’t know that.
MR. GRAMLICH: Me and him were pretty good buddies. We worked together. And I
worked with the Girl Scouts all of the time. I spent a lot of time with them. I got a big
plaque from them when I retired. We had seven or eight hundred acres that we worked
with them on, teaching about fire safety, and the safety of the kids. We did some
commercial harvesting and marking. We had a tornado come across the Girl Scout
Camp. It came across the lake, and there was a waterspout. It went into a farmer’s
cornfield. I was out in the yard with one of my boys and it looked like the cornfield was
20
up in the air, going around in our yard! We ran into a building that was an old chicken
house and watched it go over. It tore the hell out of the timber up in the Girl Scout
Camp. I had to talk to them to get the stuff out. It was all big trees. We had to get
somebody it there to harvest it. The harvester didn’t make a hell of a lot of money. He
had so spend it all on gas and moving it and stuff like that. They realized a few hundred
bucks from it. In the rest of the State, at the Girl Scout Camps, they started using a little
commercial timber harvesting. I talked to the girls all of the time, and told them what we
did in the Fish and Wildlife. I would try to help them get the right kind of shrubs and
tress to plant for the wildlife. Every year we would plant stuff for wildlife. Me and Sealy
used to drive all of the way down to the Conservation Camp and talk to people there.
That was on our own. Of course, Bill Hickling told us to “show the flag, and take
whatever time you have to”. He wanted us to stay in communication with the sportsmen
and the wildlife people. They used to have the Retriever Trials; I guess they still do, in
Washington County. I was a duck hunter, and I had a retriever. I used to use a lot of
retrievers. I used German Shorthairs for retrieving. I got my first one while I was in
Germany and brought it back. I kept “Germans” until I started using “Labs” [Labrador
Retrievers] because they swim better than the “Germans”. I almost lost a couple of
“Germans” when they went out so far chasing a bird. They couldn’t go as fast. A Lab
can go faster and catch them. I remember when one of my “Shorthairs” was out in the
swamp, the water was high, and she got on a stump. She was so tired of swimming, and
she just started to howl. When I left, she was so tired. I told her that if she wanted to
come, she would have to swim to me. She was just so tired; she looked at me and
howled. [Makes a dog-howling sound]. But anyhow, I used to always shoot the Retriever
Trials. It was either throwing Pheasants or Pigeons. They only have so many Pheasants,
and there are so many dogs. You don’t want to miss many. You didn’t want to let any
birds get away. I used to shoot with the Commissioner, Joey Buckman. He was a good
shot. We did all right. He used to tell me that he didn’t have anybody that he would
rather shoot with than me. We would cover each other at the trails when the pressure was
on. I met a lot of decent people doing that. I met Augie Belmont from Belmont Park in
New York.
MR. GOETTEL: I have heard the name.
MR. GRAMLICH: He had a Lab that he paid like nine thousand dollars for. It wasn’t
any better than our local dogs. But you know, you meet people that way, and let them
know what you’re doing in Fish and Wildlife.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you know Rachel Carson?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I didn’t, but boy, she was great. She started the program, and
got rid of DDT.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought that you might have known her through your work with
Eagles and DDT.
21
MR. GRAMLICH: I never knew her personally, but I always kept up with what she was
doing. There was a fellow at Patuxent, a hell of a good Chemist, I can’t remember his
name, and we had a good relationship. He would always include me in the papers that he
wrote for Wildlife Journal and stuff like that. All I did was get specimens for him. Then
when we worked with the State. They were spraying chemicals, and were concerned
about the effect the chemicals were having on the birds, in particular. We would shoot
birds, and collect their brains. Al Golden used to come to me. I don’t know how well
you know him.
MR. GOETTEL: I know him real well.
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, he’s a real funny guy. Him and the Black flies didn’t get along
too good. He always wound up looking like he had the measles from getting bitten. He
wouldn’t grease himself good with the repellent, or keep his shirt on. I always felt sorry
for Al. But he’s right up there. [With the best] It was an ideal way to work. I hated like
hell to even have to retire. The only reason I retired was. . . Pete would ask me, “For
Christ’s sake, when are you going to retire”? He wanted to know so he could move up!
MR. GOETTEL: That sounds just like him! [Laughing]
MR. GRAMLICH: I told him, “Sure as hell not before I’m sixty-two! I’d just as soon go
when I’m sixty-five”. He talked me into retiring when I was sixty-two. Now, of course,
he moved to town. He’s staying in Boston. I knew him a lot in Boston. I used to stay
with him sometimes at his house that he had up by Parker River. He had a dog that used
to hate me. He was a housedog, and he would growl and wanted to bite me all of the
time. I knew his family well.
MR. GOETTEL: Well, I really appreciate you talking to me, Frank.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was fun talking about everything! Goddamnit! I knew it was
something…{Remembers that he was going to offer Mr. Goettel something to eat or
drink]
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, that’s all right.
MR. GRAMLICH: I’m such a dope! [Walking away from recorder, interview finishes]

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1
INTERVIEW WITH FRANK GRAMLICH
BY THOMAS GOETTEL MAY 23, 2000
MR. GOETTEL: It is May 23, 2000, and we are sitting in Readfield, Maine with Frank
Gramlich. Frank retired in 1982 as the Wildlife Assistant Supervisor in Augusta, Maine.
Maybe you could just tell me Frank, how you got into the Fish and Wildlife Service.
MR. GRAMLICH: I retired from the military in 1959. Before I retired I had already
talked to the people in the Biology department at the University of Maine. When I went
into the Army I was 19, and I retired as a Major. But the thing is, I didn’t have any
education. I had one year of High School. I always wanted to be a soldier, and go
places. I enlisted before the war in 1939. I wanted to go to the Philippines, as far away
as I could. And they said, “Well, on your first enlistment, you have to go where we send
you. You are going to Hawaii”. I didn’t think that was too bad for a first enlistment. I
learned to “soldier” in Hawaii. We were all soldiers there, and being in the service, the
rest of the people were civilians, they didn’t count. We were elitists. I left Hawaii two
weeks for the “Japs” bombed it, and the war started.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: The fact is, that when the “Japs” were bombing Pearl Harbor, I was
in jail in Salinas, California.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GRAMLICH: It was one of our Saturday nights. Me and my buddy Rich, and
another soldier that came back from Hawaii with me, we just went to Salinas. We were
stationed at Fort Ord. The cops said, “Come with me”. And we said, “What are we
doing?” We had had a few drinks, but we were sober and were getting ready to go back
to the base. He pulled a gun out, and marched us in. There was a guy standing at the
desk there, and he says, “Oh, it looks like you got them!” They took our prints, “bing,
bing, bing,” and luckily the next morning, they said, “Boy, you guys are lucky!” They
had found that they had a set of prints from somebody else that fit our description. So we
got out of jail, and found that the “Japs” had bombed Pearl Harbor! We got back to Fort
Ord, we were regular Army, and everybody else practically, at that time were draftees.
They had been drafted for a year. They were all laughing at us. It was really easy for
regular Army people to move up pretty fast. I wound up as First Sergeant when I was 21
years old. All my life I wanted to be a biologist, and work with wildlife. Since I didn’t
have any schooling or anything, I took a test to get into the University. They accepted
me, and I started. I liked it, and did great. I was on the Dean’s List all the time I was in
the bachelor program. After I graduated in 1963, I went into the master’s program.
Every summer, I went and worked for Fish and Game. The first summer, I dipped
salmon down on the Machias in Whitneyville. Then, another year I worked with Skip
Spencer on duck banding. Year after year, I went to Moosehorn. I got to know the
people in Fish and Wildlife pretty well. There was Wes Jones, and Doug was in my
class, he was a classmate of mine.
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MR. GOETTEL: Doug Mullen?
MR. GRAMLICH: Doug was quite a character. He used to have a pet wildcat, a bobcat.
MR. GOETTEL: I heard about that.
MR. GRAMLICH: He was always “gung ho”. But, I got along good with the Wildlife
people. When I got my masters, I was married and had four kids. I had my Army
retirement pension, but I thought that I would like to get a job with Fish and Wildlife. So
I applied, and the next day, they hired me.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I had to move to Great Meadows in Littleton, Massachusetts. It was
Great Meadows/Monomoy. I fought the traffic, and worked as much as I could. I kind of
enjoyed it. For Massachusetts, it’s at least a decent place, for me, with the wilderness and
all.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you the refuge manager at Great Meadows?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, and at Monomoy. I was the manager at both of them. Of
course, Bill French was up at Parker River. He had the refuge program up there. He was
my supervisor, and we got along great. One day Bill Hickling came down and wanted to
look at Monomoy and Great Meadows. I showed him around the refuges. Bill Hickling
was still with Wildlife Services. Tom Horne was the chief of refuges at the time and he
didn’t want to go with Tom. But he was Tom Horne. He wanted the rocks to be painted
and the fenced fixed. He was more interested in the latrines and stuff, than he was in
wildlife. But he was all right. I liked Tom. Everybody got along good with Tom. But
Bill Hickling came down, and we went down to Monomoy, it was at the end of the
summer. He said, “I might want to stay tonight”. I said, “Well, we can get you into a
hotel, no problem.” And he said, “Geez, they charge an awful lot!” I said, “It will cost
you three dollars a night!” One of the guys in the park owned a motel, and that’s what he
charged the government people.
MR. GOETELL: No kidding?
MR: GRAMLICH: He was impressed, he said, “Boy, this is great at this time of year!” I
wanted to get back up to Maine so I talked to him. And he said, “O.K., I’ll see what I can
do.” And in a little while he called, and arranged for me to transfer up to Orono, he had
offices in Orono. And Ed [unintelligible] had the place then. So I moved my family up
to Bangor. We still owned the house in Bangor, and we moved in. I got started with
Wildlife Services there, getting chipmunks and squirrels and gardens and things. It was
great, I learned a lot. In those days, you didn’t have a secretary so you had to do your
reports and stuff all by yourself. I could do twenty words a minute on the typewriter, or
something like that. But you had to spend too much time on paperwork. Then, they said,
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“Well, we want you to come to Augusta.” It was closer to Maine Fish and Game. I
worked together with them. I knew a lot of people at Maine Fish and Game because I
had worked with them summer after summer. I came and found this place. I had a friend
who was in the Army with me; he was one of my Lieutenants, while I was a Captain in
charge of him. He says, “Hey, there’s a place right up here that’s for sale. You might
like it.” I looked at it. This place is two hundred years old.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: This part is new, but we spend more time in here.
MR. GOETTEL: It’s nice and light.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was built in 1790 something. Way back. Anyhow, I looked in the
front window, and said, “I’ll take it.” I paid sixteen thousand, and it came with twenty-two
acres. We bought it, and put a roof on, and other things that it needed. But anyhow,
when I got to Augusta, I got very close with the commissioners of the Fish and Game and
we had a good relationship. We move into the Federal Building. We used to have an
office right next to Fish and Game out on Sewell Street. But they moved me into the
Federal Building. I moved in there with two Federal wardens, U. S. Fish and Wildlife
wardens. They were great, but we didn’t have any secretary. The thing is, we had to
have a girl. It was such a better job, having a good secretary. Me, and Dave Sealy, we
chose a secretary. There was one nice blonde girl who came in. She had some
references. This other girl worked for the IRS part-time, and she wanted a full-time job.
She was in the hospital, having a baby. We talked to the Chief of the IRS, and he said,
“Well, if you get her, you’ve got a good girl, she really works.” So we hired her while
she was in the hospital having a baby.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We never saw her. She came in and we were pleasantly surprised.
She said she was halfway married, and she and her almost husband had two kids and she
had just had another. She was a jewel. We had her for sixteen or seventeen years. She
just handled everything. She handled the phone and all the paperwork.
MR. GOETTEL: Her name was Kathy what now?
MR. GRAMLICH: Kathleen Chapman.
MR. GOETTEL: Chapman. That’s right, I remember her.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. I gave her everything I could, you know. She was a “6” I
guess. I couldn’t get her higher than a “6. She deserved more!
MR. GOETTEL: Oh yeah, they all do.
4
MR. GRAMLICH: She and her husband have a horse-riding academy down here. She
got me interested in horses again. We used to have them when I was in the service
[military]. We inherited three Hungarian cavalry mounts.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Lieutenant Henley retired, well, he didn’t retire, he went home. And
when he went home, I took over his mounts. And for years I had them. When we got
married, we lived on the Continental Divide, close to [unintelligible] and I had a big
prison camp, Moramar, that I was in charge of. I used to have one of the prisoners take
care of my horses. He would saddle me up, and I would ride home at night. It was
probably three or four miles to where I was staying with my wife.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: In the morning, I would ride back.
MR. GOETTEL: What was the name of the prison camp again?
MR. GRAMLICH: I can’t remember. It was a big prison camp. We had soldiers in it,
German soldiers. They hadn’t released them yet. The Nuremberg Trials were still going
on. Anyhow, I was a second lieutenant. I really loved my horses a lot, and learned to
ride. During the day, I used to canter around a little bit. There was a building on the
outside of the barbed wire fence, and there was a grassy area about twenty feet wide,
between the fence and the building. I was cantering along between the fence and the
building, and all of a sudden there was a jeep! It was going in the gate to the camp. They
didn’t stop or anything, and I had to pull back! I still remember those guys’ faces!
[Laughing]
MR. GOETTEL: I thought you were going to say that it was Eisenhower or something in
the jeep!
MR. GRAMLICH: No, but those guys can remember still!
MR. GOETTEL: So when you were working here in Maine, you worked a lot with
Eagles. How did you get involved with Eagles?
MR. GRAMLICH: I remember exactly how I got involved with Eagles because I got in
close fairly close with the chief of Audubon. The President was Dick Anderson. He says
to me, “Goddammit, Gramlich, people are killing our Eagles! You are a Federal boy, and
I want you to do something about it!” I was getting dead and wounded Eagles all of the
time. I said, “O.K., let’s do something. His idea was to start an education program for
people, tell them about Eagles and protecting them. We had thirty-three nests in Maine
then. This was not a lot, compared to now. I talked to Mel Coles up at the University and
told him that I thought we ought to have somebody from the University here. Maybe we
could start a joint Eagle program. He got Bucky Owen to work with me on Eagles. We
5
needed to protect the nesting sites. And we started a program of landowner agreements
that would govern utilization around the sites, and keep them as far away from the
Eagle’s nests as possible. We also had articles published in the paper to educate people
about eagles. Pretty soon we weren’t seeing as many dead or wounded Eagles. There
was an Indian trapper, up on Indian Island who shot an Eagle one time. And I raised hell
with the Chief. We got a letter from an Indian kid, who lived up on Indian Island. It
said, “I am an Indian, and I was up on the river the other day, and saw an Eagle flying,
my whole being changed then. I could remember my ancestors. I really love Eagles!”
This was from a little kid! Then, we weren’t getting good production. We knew we had
thirty-three nests, but thought, ‘where the hell is the production?’ They weren’t
producing young. I hired this kid, Bob Baugh, and we looked at some eggs. He was a
“monkey”, a tree climber. He was great, because it was kind of tough, getting to an Eagle
nest. There were a lot of dead branches and stuff, and it was hard to get in. But he would
go like a monkey. He was careful and he never hurt himself. He never fell. We took
some eggs and sent them to Patuxent. I forget who was the chemist at Patuxent, but we
worked very closely.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Lucille Stickell?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I wasn’t her, but maybe it was her boss. We started getting
Wildlife Journals and stuff. He was great. He said “Well, this has got too much DDT”.
We wanted to increase production, and we said, “If those eggs are no good, let’s get some
eggs from some other places. Who the hell is going to give us an Eagle egg?” Some
people from Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Illinois said, “We got some nests, and we can
take an egg from a few nests and give them to you”. We sent a suitcase. [Asking
himself] Who the hell was the Fish and Wildlife guy who used to bring them in a little
egg box?
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Paul Nickerson maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, Paul Nickerson. He was a good guy. Any time when we put an
egg in a nest, why, we’d have somebody from television there to show it. They would
[Eagles] produce and we’d band the young, and the whole works. Then we decided after
a while to try not just eggs, but young eagles. We placed young ones in the nests. We
wondered what would happen. We didn’t know for sure if they’d accept the young ones.
It might be hard with the young ones up there squeaking while “you” [an Eagle] were
trying to work the nest. I think it was down in Washington County where we put a young
one in a nest. We had already taken the eggs out. And he was up there going “Squeak,
squeak”, and we weren’t sure what was going to happen. But the Eagle answered back.
The eggs we had taken out were failed eggs. We were down on the ground and we
wondered, “What are you going to do”? And she flew right down and sat on the nest, and
they went “beak, beak” and they were bonding right away! It was great!
One other time, we put a young one in a nest, and it was close to an Osprey nest. The
Eagles and Osprey were having interaction, fighting each other, and all that stuff. We put
one in, and that Eagle flew down grabbed that young one and flew away {killing it]. He
probably thought that it was an Osprey. He didn’t recognize it as an Eagle.
6
MR. GOETTEL: Aw, that’s too bad!
MR. GRAMLICH: As far as I know, that was the only one we lost.
MR. GOETTEL: Well that really turned the Eagles around, because I know there’s what,
two hundred nests now? Something like that?
MR: GRAMLICH: Yeah, and there was winter-feeding and stuff like that you know.
We could take carcasses off the roads or highways, and set up feeding stations. We
would check and see how many banded ones came in.
MR. GOETTEL: Where did you have the feeding stations?
MR. GRAMLICH: Mostly down east around Penobscot Bay. That was my biggest thing
that I accomplished was working with Eagles. But I had lots of help you know from
everyone. And help from the State. And since I was involved personally, it really made
me feel great. That was my fun job, working with the Bald Eagles. Another thing was
that we had Dr. Everhart. He was the Fishery man up at the University. He said,
”Gramlich, we’re having trouble, we’ve got this big hatchery here in Maine, and we’re
taking the Salmon, and taking the eggs and raising the smelts, and we put them in the
river, and we’re not getting results from it. Now we are tagged them, and we want to see
results from the tags”. He said, “We think there may be some relation between smelts,
and Cormorants.” He told me he wanted me to go down and see what I could find out.
Down in Whitneyville, I had a couple of truckloads of smelts. They weighed an eighth of
a pound. They were good-sized smelts. I put a couple thousand into the Machias River.
The next morning I went out and shot a Cormorant. I opened him up and there was fifty-five
tags [in the bird’s stomach].
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: I said, “Holy, Christ! I have an idea now what’s happening”!
MR. GOETTEL: I guess that now you know where they are going!
MR. GRAMLICH: The great breeding island was Old Man Island, down off of Cutland.
It was just one hundred yards from the house that I owned down in Cutland. It was a
hundred yards to the water, and about a half a mile as the crow flies. I was out there and
there was all those young Cormorants. There was a lot of tags that had been regurgitated
by the adults and the young ones would eat those tags. You could pick up hundreds of
tags there. This had to be the end of the Cormorants. We tried a lot of things, but we
wanted to get rid of them fast. I wore myself out every day shooting them with a
shotgun.
MR. GOETTEL: So did you get rid of the colony down there then?
7
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. There used to be trees on it. And they built their nests into the
trees. The Cormorant droppings killed the trees and they went down. The trees were all
snags then. The birds would build their nests on the stumps or on the bare ground on the
rocks. I persecuted them for, oh, I don’t know, five or six years, but after that, there
weren’t any more Cormorants on the island. We broke the eggs and poisoned the nests,
but we had to shoot most of them. We would go there in the morning and stay all day.
“Bang, bang, and kill about one hundred Cormorants in one day.
MR. GOETTEL: You worked a lot on Seagulls too, didn’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah, I also worked to protect Puffins, and Terns. Once we got
chemicals that was the big thing. What do they use know? I can’t think of what we used
then.
MR: GOETTEL: That would be “13-39”.
MR. GRAMLICH: We used to call it something else.
MR. GOETTEL: Starlecide, maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, that’s it. We did the work with Dr. Wolfe, from the
manufacturer. He was a chemist. We were trying to use it to inhibit the reproduction in
pigeons, and other birds, and kill them. We went out and feed them, and feed them.
Then we when out and trapped hundreds of pigeons, we would dye them and release
them and follow the nesting. It kind of worked pretty decent. There was goddamn little
production from the nests. But we started finding a lot of dead pigeons too. We learned
that it was a lethal agent and it worked pretty damned good.
MR. GOETTEL: I never heard that. No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We used it for everything. Dr. Wolfe would come down and we
would go over and look. Things happen when you’re doing something like that. When
you have them marked, and have flocks of brilliant red pigeons you can find out where
they were feeding. You can trap them there. You don’t know whether they are from
downtown, sitting on the Sears building. But you release them, and go downtown, and
there they are sitting on the Sears building. So you know that those are the ones that
were feeding out at the railroad station. We did a hell of a lot of work on pigeon, gull,
and Cormorant control. Those were the big ones.
MR. GOETTEL: I think you worked with Bill Drury out on Betinicus Rock was that and
maybe Carl Buchiester too?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: I think that was some of the first gull control.
8
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. The whole while we used it. We used Bill Snow’s boat. Bill
Snow was the federal warden. He didn’t really approve of it, but he went along with it.
He didn’t tell us that it wasn’t a good idea. I’d go down and get, I don’t know how many
loads of stale bread. I would cut it up and mix “13-39” with margarine do it wouldn’t
dissolve in the water too much. I made sandwiches. On Saturday and Sunday we would
take a lot of these sandwiches out there, and at a table we would say, “Here, gully-gully!”
and “whoosh” they would come and get them. After a while we would get so many gulls,
the fishermen would start to raise hell. They wanted to know if we wanted to kill all of
the gulls. But we said, “No, just around these certain islands”. They were upset by it.
It was nice being with Bill Snow. He was a typical warden. He came in one morning
and told us that he would be gone for the day because there had been a death in his
family. “I’ll see you in a day or two.” Then Kathy came in, and we told her “Bill won’t
be in today, he had a death in the family”. She said, “Family? What family has he got?
The only family that he has is his wife!” It was a Monday morning. She got a newspaper
and it was his wife who had died. He never said that it was her.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no! No kidding!
MR. GRAMLICH: Anyhow, we went to the service. And Bill took two days off. But he
was Bill Snow, that’s all. He was a good warden, I thought.
MR. GOETTEL: He lives around here somewhere doesn’t he?
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, he was born in a house just a few miles over from here. But I
don’t know where Bill is now. I have seen him.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought he was still around here somewhere.
MR GRAMLICH: He might be somewhere down around the coast somewhere but I
don’t have the slightest idea.
MR. GOETTEL: Were you born in Maine?
MR. GRAMLICH: No.
MR. GOETTEL: Where were you born?
MR. GRAMLICH: In New York, Long Island city.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, no kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: We moved when I was a little kid. We moved out to around
Commack, Long Island. I went to school out there. I used to duck hunt on Long Island
Sound. We hunted rabbits all the time, cottontails. I almost killed a deer with an axe one
time, it was so tame, but it was illegal. Before I went into the service, I was working as a
laborer. We were building a road. We were building a road to a camp. The Germans
9
were making a Nazi camp. It was before the war, and they were building a camp so that
the Germans would come. We always thought that they were Nazis. We called them
Nazis because they talked German all of the time. And they were. There was a lot of
Germans in that area. We were working and someone said, “Look, there’s a deer coming
out of the woods”! I had an axe, and I thought I’d see how close I could get. I walked up
to it, the deer was right there. [Demonstrating] If I had had the axe in the right position, I
could have killed it! I used to drive a tractor for the boss. Gus Sigschwartz was his
name. It’s amazing the memories that come back! We knew exactly where he lived in
Commack. He lived next to a brothel. Gus had a red headed wife. But rumor had it that
whenever the brothel owner needed an extra girl, he would get Gus’ wife! We all
believed it, but I don’t know.
MR. GOETTEL: You said you were in jail in Salinas. How did you get from there to
Germany?
MR. GRAMLICH: I was artillery, and we had old, French “75s”. I was a gunner,
corporal, and then gunner sergeant in just a short time because I had couple of years of
service. I was in the 7th Division. We went to the desert and had desert maneuvers. We
were getting ready to go to North Africa to take care of Rommel. But they called us
back. They said they needed some troops, and some non-commissioned officers to form
a new division down in Mississippi. I was told that they felt that I was a good gunner and
a good artillery section chief. They also told me, “We’re going to send you as chief of
guns, or staff sergeant to Mississippi. I went down to Mississippi, and had to report in. I
was single at this time. A bunch of officers were cooking for themselves, and they said,
“Boy are we glad to see you”! They wanted someone to cook for them and stuff. I
happened to have a thirty-day leave coming up, and I said I would be back in three days.
I was on a detail that had to go up to the railroad tracks about fifty miles away to meet the
troop trains coming in. They brought in the draftees. They drafted mostly boys from
Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Illinois, and New York state boys. And they had all these big
“fool” uniforms that they carried. They were told, “You’re going to go to Camp Van
Dorn and learn to be a soldier”. Me, and my crew, I had two or three guys, we’d go in
and we’d carry a bunch of brooms and dustpans, and stuff. We would hear, “Oh look,
there’s a Sergeant, he’d going to clean up”! We’d start sweeping them up. We would
march them into where we had to bring them. That was fun. When the training was
finished I made first Sergeant, I was probably twenty=one when I was first Sergeant. I
took them overseas when we got orders, and I was their first sergeant. They still call me
“Sarge” even though I was later an officer whenever I see them. But we got right into the
“crap”. We did the Battle of the Bulge, and Cologne Plains and Remagen Bridgehead. I
got wounded about three days after we crossed the bridge at Remagen. It wasn’t too bad,
but I got airlifted to a hospital in Paris. The 60th General was a regular civilian hospital,
but the Army took it over. I was in the Officers ward. A nurse came in and told me “this
was General Rommel’s bed.” [Meaning that Mr. Gramlich was in the same bed as
Rommel had been in] He got wounded when he was on the Western Front. A plane
dropped a bomb kind of close, and he was wounded, but not too seriously. He went in
and stayed in the hospital for a month before he went back to Germany.
10
MR. GOETTEL: So you were in the Battle of the Bulge? Boy, that was quite a battle,
huh?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah.
MR. GOETTEL: Was that in 1944?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, late 1944. It was the eighteenth of December. I was a first
sergeant, but I knew the Colonel pretty well. He had watched us get ready for overseas.
We had to take forced marches, you know? They were like twenty-five mile hikes. I’d
try to keep the guys together. They would start to lag after twenty-five miles. There
would be some big Corporal lagging behind and I would push him and say, “Hey! Get up
there, keep up!” And kick him in the ass. My officer pulled me aside and said, “You
know, you’re not supposed to do that, but it is effective”! He called me in on the
eighteenth of December and said, “Gramlich, I know you’ve been in the Artillery for a
long time, and you know I’m going to send you up as a forward observer. All of our
forward observers have been killed. And I want you to go up. The Infantry has been
pretty well shot to hell but I’m going to put you in with this Combat Engineer Battalion
on top of [unintelligible place name] Ridge, it’s a hot spot. And I want you to go up there
and see what you can do.” The snow was up to your ass then. He said, “Get a radio
operator and a jeep and get up there. Here’s a map, and here’s what I want you to do.”
Oh boy, the battle was ragging! There were goddamned “star shells” all over. We started
off at night, it was dark and we could hear tanks, but weren’t sure whose tanks they were.
Three of us went up to find the engineers, and we didn’t know where the hell we were
going or where we’d end up. I said, “Let’s not waste our energy”. So we camped out in
the snow. We overcoats on, and we laid in a pile. In the morning somebody was coming
down the hill and I said, “Hey, you know where the engineers are”? “Yeah, right up
there!” I was new to this forward observer stuff because I wasn’t an officer and had
never been a forward observer before. But, I could adjust fire because I used to run a
sand table for the officers. They would shoot a round of big BBs into the sand table.
They would give the commands as though it was land. It was a training thing, and I ran
the site just like it would be for real. I knew a lot about it. I reported to the Colonel, and
he said, “Well, find a place where you can see, you’ve not a nice place here with a big
field down below”. I went as far as the outpost. One of the guys I took with me was a
radio operator who had been with the forward observers before. We found a nice big
hole, up to here, {showing depth] but I could see good. But then I said, “Oh, Jesus
Christ!” The whole field started turning into Germans! “Here they come! Press, fire
mission, fire mission, Infantry in the open!” I yelled into the radio! Over the radio, I
heard Germans yelling orders. The Germans had jammed our radios, you see, but they
probably didn’t know we had a little switch that you could change channels with. You
could get it back again. We got it open again [the radio] and the fire direction officer
says, “We’ve got new fuses for you. They are variable time fuses, and all the artillery
battalions have them. We’re going to give you time fuses. You don’t have to adjust, just
get the rounds out there!” Here they come! “Fire for affect! And fire upon request!”
And “Boom, Boom!” Those things were busting all over. There were guys out in the
open, and that stuff was spreading real good. Boy, people started dying, and what was
11
left of them was heading back into the woods. And “Pres” says, “You know? We better
get the hell back into our lines” because we were pretty well exposed there. He was
right! We got up to the top of the hill, and the engineers said, “Oh Christ, you did a great
job!” One sergeant told us to take his hole, because he had to deliver some ammunition
to his men. He said, “You guys get in the hole”. We got in the hole, and it felt pretty
good. A guy came up and said, “Gramlich, Gramlich?” And I said, “Here!” And he
said, “I’m going to relieve you, they sent me up to relieve you”! In reply, I said, “Get
your ass in the hole for Christ’s sake”! There was a tank right there shooting. He said,
“Get me a bazooka”! But I told him to get his ass in the hole or he was going to get is ass
shot off. The Lieutenant had a bazooka, and he said, “Gimme that!” He was going to
blow up the tank with it. He had to cover fifty yards. He got down on one knee and
fired. “Vroom”! You the see that the rocket went out and hit the tank, and glanced off,
and the tank said, “Oh, there must be somebody shooting at us!” [Laughing] He came
back by yelling, “I’m hit, I’m hit!” We called for a medic, and he went toward the medic.
He was sitting on a hole, and blood was coming out of his field jacket and the medic
came over to help him. He was unbuttoning his jacket and the tank said, “Boom!” And
blew the both of them to pieces. He got a Silver Star.
MR. GOETTEL: So you were fifty yards from the tank?!
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah!
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Then I started to adjust on one tank, and I got one right close to
them, but you can’t fire a lot of ammunition because you’ve got your own people in there
too. You could only fire one round at a time. “Boom”, and you realize that you’ve got a
short one. I added ten yards, and went over them. The tank would realize what we were
doing, and would back off and get down in the “draw”. I knew the coordinates for the
“draw” good. I said, “Fire in the draw!” And we put a bunch of fire on top of them. We
could see the smoke come up and the explosions going off. The other tanks were
shooting all goddamned day! They told me later that I had like eighty-four guns firing
for me. I killed about twelve tanks. Then that night, there was an infantry attack. I had a
machine gun right there. This bastard came towards me. They were shooting like hell
and there was hollering all around. I had my hole that the sergeant gave me and I always
carried a carbine and of course my pistol. I saw this bastard coming and he was firing an
automatic weapon. The muzzle blasts lit him up so I could see him good, and I put one
right in his heart, just about. He was gone. We stopped that attack, but it was bad. In the
morning, I went out to look at “my German”. He was an officer. He had on a
paratrooper, camouflage helmet. We were looking at him and a tank fired. He was far
enough down so he could see us moving. We damned near got whacked! But that was
war. When I got back they said, “We’re going to make you a second Lieutenant!” My
old first sergeant said, “Gramlich, don’t let them do it to you! They either make you
chicken-shit, or they’ll get you killed!” I told him that I thought my mother would like it.
None of that is Fish and Wildlife. We’ve talked about as far away from first coming into
the Fish and Wildlife as we could get. I enjoyed that as much as Fish and Wildlife.
12
MR. GOETTEL: The Battle of the Bulge was several months long wasn’t in?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. I think it was three months long. We left position on the 31st.
We were busting the Seigfried Line with the old Mageino Line that the French had, and
the Germans had taken. We’d pick a company of infantry and attack it with artillery.
We’d take one bunker a day. And try to take another the next day. We tried to make it
so that their bunkers couldn’t support each other, because they had big guns. It was kind
of tough, and people got killed pretty fast. There were a lot of casualties. Other things
happened too. Marlene Dietrich came over with, oh what’s the name of that: They had
shows for the soldiers?
MR. GOETTEL: The U.S.O.?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. All of a sudden, we realized, “ Jesus, if she ever got captured,
it would be her ass!”
MR. GOETTEL: Oh man!
MR. GRAMLICH: We were supposed to have show coming up in the next week, but
things were too “hot”, so they moved her back to Paris. Even then, when we moved into
that one position from Belgium, and moved into position on the Rhine, when we got there
we thought it looked like a good place to put the guns. A whole herd of deer came
through the lines. They were nice deer. They were big, red deer. They came across the
front of our lines, and they opened up with their “ack-ack” on the deer, trying to get one.
Our own “ack-ack” damn near killed us! The Germans were shooting buzz bombs. The
“V-1s”. You could see them up in the sky, and when they stopped, “Boom!” They were
like a thousand pounds, and it felt like the floor falling out underneath. I was in [town
name] next to a church. I had to relieve myself. I had to take a “crap”, and sat down next
to the church. I heard a buzz bomb and cleared out. It hit the other side of the church
and I almost got buried in those clay shingles.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? Holy smokes!
MR. GRAMLICH: Things like that were going on all of the time. When our guns would
fire, and of course, as we fired the Germans could pick up where we were. They gave us
a hell of a time in the Artillery. We had a lot of incoming as well as our stuff going out.
That was kind of tough, but we were dug in. The captain said, “I want everybody dug
in!” I went around and checked to see if everybody was dug in. Everybody had good
overhead covering and everything. We were in pretty good shape. We had a hell of a
show with all the stuff coming in. After the shelling stopped, and nobody was hurt, I said
to the captain, “It doesn’t look like it hit anything”. And he said, “You’re full of shit,
sergeant”! The officers had a tent. It was stupid to be in a tent, instead of being dug in,
and there was a big hole in the side of the tent. I said, “Oh, well that’s tough”! They told
me to set up a roadblock. They had had a truck shot out from in front of them. We had a
couple of fifty caliber machine guns. I had six myself. I took those extra three machine
13
guns and dug a hole. I had to use my ammunition section beside the roadblock. All of a
sudden that colonel said, “We’ve got to stay until we’re overrun. That’s the last work I
got from battalion”. I thought, “Oh, that’s nice”! They [The Germans] had tanks and
everything. A little while later I see a captain zooming by in a jeep! He says, “I’m going
to Battalion, I don’t know when I’ll be back”! I thought, “You chicken-shit bastard,
you’re bugging out!” But he did. And he went to plead with the colonel not to let our
guys get killed. He wanted them to let us move back a little. But still, it was pretty
convenient for him to be back there. I had a pretty good field of fire where I had my
machine guns set up. And I had a box of grenades. I knew we couldn’t stand up against
a tank. I looked down and it was all gray. They were moving, [The Germans]. They
were running, and some of them weren’t carrying weapons. There wasn’t anything
between them and us except for about one hundred yards. I said, “O.K. boys, this looks
like it’s it. Let’s take as many of them sons of bitches with us as we can. Wait ‘til they
get in real close and we can get a bunch of them right off”. Once we started shooting,
they would get a tank and blow our asses off. They were coming and coming, and the
phone rang. We had a field phone from Battalion, down to the guns. The operator came
on, and told us to move back. The colonel had decided that it would be better if we
moved back. I said “there’s no sense in us dying here. Let’s get out asses out, while we
can”. We grabbed the machine guns and went to the truck. It was on the other side of the
hill, so they couldn’t see the truck. We took small arms and went down. They were
hitting the town that we had to go through real bad with artillery. We couldn’t go far
because there were so many trucks smashed up in front of us. We got out and there was a
stonewall around a cemetery. I thought that this would be a good place to lie down.
There were a couple of guys lying there and I got on top of those guys, up against the
rocks. After the incoming stopped, I got up. I realized then, that two of the guys were
dead. There was so much stuff there, that I hadn’t realized it. We moved back to another
place. And it was touch and go. We had to be lucky to get through that shit!
I have been in touch with one of my sergeants who was there. And one of my buddies,
who was my radio operator, he just died last year. They are all going fast. There is this
one Indian kid in California. He’s still left. I just sent my letter in yesterday, or day
before yesterday, for the reunion. It’s going to be in Philadelphia. I said, “I am too
stupid, I can’t come. Good Luck!”
MR. GOETTEL: That’s too bad.
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, I’m not doing much these days!
MR. GOETTEL: That’s all right, that’s all right. You were in the Korean War too
weren’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah. In the cold war, after Korea, I was up in the Artic, up in
northern Greenland. I got a battlefield promotion to Captain. I was a battery commander
the whole time I was in Korea. The first day we got into Korea at Pusan they put us next
to a brook that was about as twice as big as my driveway. There was a big rice patty.
The all kinds of stuff was going up. I didn’t like it so I told the guys to dig in. I said, “I
want everything dug in as fast as you can!” Just about everyone was dug in good, and
14
here, the shit started. There was massive machine gun fire. When I first went to Korea
the [unintelligible] was four guns. We had four “105s”. They changed it. They wanted
each battery to have six guns. So they gave me two guns and they gave me fifteen
Koreans. They just picked them off the street. They were ROK soldiers, but they
weren’t trained or anything, but they were part of my troops. We were in one fight where
we were next to a dike, and when the firing started, I looked at my first lieutenant and he
couldn’t stand up. I ran over to the machine gun. There were bullets bouncing off the
goddamn shield of the gun, “bing, bing”. I looked in one hole, and there were two
Koreans. They looked about “this” big down in the hole. They had a nice M-1 rifle
sticking up and two bandoliers of ammunition. I grabbed the rifles and told them to give
me the ammunition. I put it in and started firing at the flash of the machine gun. I shot
about a bandolier of ammunition. Of course the machine gun answered. But I think I
might have stopped them. I thought it was not a good sign that they would fire at us like
that, when we had the big guns. I called the sergeant out of a hole, I said to him, “Let’s
get a guy to load ammunition. I’ll take the sights and you take elevation”. We got on
that gun, and every time a saw a flash out there, why, “Boom!” We were shooting a
thirty-three pound projectile at them. When it was over we hauled six truckloads of
bodies away. I lost two guys, killed, and one guy went to “pieces”. He couldn’t stand it.
He had one of my machine guns. The colonel came up and said, “Get rid of that guy, that
will spread through the whole outfit”! They took our battery commander to headquarters.
We called him “cautious Charlie” anyway. And they made me the battery commander.
They gave me a Bronze Star. And I used the Koreans, oh, jesus, did I use them! One of
them was a Korean Lieutenant, Kim Sung Yu. He was like my brother after a while. He
taught me everything about Korea, and was my interpreter. He went to school in Tokyo
at National University, and studied politics. He didn’t have his degree but he was smart.
He was the biggest help, and a good buddy. He went through the war and made it out
O.K. I had him, and I could control my Koreans through him. I would give them leave,
so they could see their families, and they would all come back and find the outfit. I never
had any of them go “awol” or anything. They were O.K. We went to Yalu and watched
the Chinese cross that goddamned bridge. We were the last outfit to leave Pyongyang.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. We had to stay until the infantry got out. And the infantry got
out. The big thing about combat was that you were tired all of the time. Exhausted.
You would go for three or four days without getting any good sleep. And the weather,
with the rain, and snow was bad. I got malaria, and I got down to one hundred and
twenty pounds. I was skin and bones. My Korean said, “You are sick”. I was eating GI
rations all of the time. He wanted to fix me up, so he took some grenades and went out
fishing. He got some nice catfish, and fixed me up some nice fried catfish. He said,
“Here, this will make you feel better”. And I thought it was great! I can remember that
[his combat experiences] better than I can remember the Fish and Wildlife. There’s a lot
of memories in here. [Looking at a scrapbook] This one says, September 1966, that
would be the time I was at Monomoy working with the Eagles. Here is a check that I
wrote to Barnstable Treasurer “patrol Monomoy, waterfowl census.” Now why would I
write a check to Barnstable Treasurer?
15
MR. GOETTEL: Might it be the revenue sharing check?
MR. GRAMLICH: Might be. [Reading] “Patrolled about eighteen cars today. Visitors
have been on the refuge today. [Unintelligible] have been frozen, attempt at opening by
unknown person.” This is the 6th of December. Saturday the 25th, “Off duty”! I wonder
why! Here’s a preparation of a narrative report, on the 22nd, and a draft of a Sea Duck
study. One thing I did there was, we worked on banding Eiders. We also trapped Eiders.
We watched how they came ashore. We would use decoys, and they would come to the
decoys. They would walk right up, and you might have twenty=five or thirty Eiders in a
trap. It worked pretty damned decent. We were out on the bay in a twenty-eight foot
boat. It was one of the Massachusetts Game vessels. There was a bad weather warning,
but we were out. The seas came up, and it was a really big storm. I thought we were
really going to get finished on the water. The lights went out all through Massachusetts.
It was one of the worst storms ever, but we were out on the water. We should have
noticed from the Coast Guard that we shouldn’t have gone.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, from the storm warning. Did you have law enforcement
authority when you patrolled? Did you carry a gun?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I had a pistol, a K-22, but that was for “popping” things. I
didn’t carry it around except when I needed it. I used to shoot Cormorants and stuff like
that on the nest with it. [Looking at papers again, reading portions of them].
MR. GOETTEL: How did you get onto the Eiders coming up on the beach? They
normally wouldn’t do that. How did you do that?
MR. GRAMLICH: If you watch a flock of Eiders out in the water, you might see one
come up on the sandy shore.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh really? I’ve never seen them do that!
MR. GRAMLICH: Then, all of a sudden, a whole bunch will come out of the water. I
went to Monomoy with a guy from Parker River, Donnie Grover. He was a good guy.
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah he was real good guy.
MR. GRAMLICH: There was another guy, a biologist, I can’t think of his name.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Bill Forward?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, Bill Forward. He was a neat guy to work with.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you ever work with Jim Vanwheilden? He was the agent down in
Massachusetts when I was down there.
16
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh, I’ve met him.
MR. GOETTEL: I don’t know where he is now.
MR. GRAMLICH: When I came here, Dave Sealy was the agent. We got along good
with Sealy. And who was the Italian guy? He had an Italian name. They used to raise
hell with Bill Snow. Bill Snow was a stickler for discipline and stuff. There wasn’t
anything wrong with him, but he wasn’t up to Bill’s standards.
MR. GOETTEL: Was it Bill Cardoza maybe?
MR. GRAMLICH: Cardoza, yeah! He was a good buddy of mine. In fact, they were all
good guys.
MR. GOETTEL: I think Dick Stot retired.
MR. GRAMLICH: Is he retired?
MR. GOETTEL: I think it was a year or so ago.
MR. GRAMLICH: I went duck hunting with Donnie Mariss. I don’t know if you know
Donnie.
MR. GOETTEL: The entomologist, right?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah! When I went to school, I knew the director. And I asked him,
“Do you know who is the best biologist in Maine”? He says, “Who”? And I told him it
was Donnie Mariss. I said, “Christ, he’s good on everything”! He was a fishery biologist
and he knew a lot about everything, insects, and everything. He was the entomologist for
the state here. And he was a great birder. All he does now, it go look at birds. He’s
retired now, and he goes to South America, and Europe and Great Britain just to look at
birds. He’s really a birder. Donnie helped me a lot. He’s a good guy, and knows what
the hell he’s doing. He lives over in Belgrave.
[Reading out loud]
“Light dusting of snow on window during the night. About forty percent of impounded
area ice covered. Particularly lower ponds. Moved files to Bedford office. Meeting with
Don Chase”. Did you know Don Chase?
MR. GOETTEL: Yeah, he was one of the realty guys.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. “Sunday: Off duty”. [reading] I wasn’t a workaholic but if
something needed to be done, I did it! Christ, I wish I could understand my writing!
[still looking through scrapbook, finding an item he remembers] In 1968, when I didn’t
have a girl, before we had Kathy, we had the Job Corps. I said we could get a Job Corps
girl for nothing. It would cost the government anything. We got a girl from half way
down the state Poland Springs. She came from a Job Corps camp there. And she came to
17
work, and she came with a book she was going to read. Then there was a big, black, ball
player. She was really enamored with that guy. He was her idle. We asked her, “Can
you type”? “Yes, I can type.” “Peck, peck, peck” she was really slow. “Well, will you
type this up”? “Peck, peck, peck”. There were a lot of corrections. In the afternoon, I
said, “Will you type this”? She says, “Two letters in one day?” Somebody came in one
day, I think it was one of the enforcement guys, and she was lying on the floor taking a
nap.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh no!
MR. GRAMLICH: We had an office above two real estate offices. Real Estate, and
Insurance. I went down stairs one day, and said. “Have you seen my secretary?” They
said, “Secretary? That’s not a secretary, for crying out loud!” I finally had to tell her,
“Sorry”.
MR GOETTEL: It just wasn’t working out.
MR. GRAMLICH: No it wasn’t working out. The best thing she could think of was, “If
you come down to the place, I can get you on. You might see somebody that you like”.
MR. GOETTEL: Oh geez! You were involved in fighting Pittson Refinery up there in
Eastport quite a bit weren’t you?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes! I told you that didn’t I?
MR. GOETTEL: You were the expert testimony I guess, for Eagles.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was supposed to be me, and Buckey. We got to the meeting and it
seemed like there must have been fifteen lawyers! There was probably about six, or
seven, or eight, and they had their papers spread all over. They put Dr. Buckey in a room
where he couldn’t hear anything, and interviewed me for six goddamned hours straight.
I did the best I could, fighting those bastards. They made me so mad. They would be
asking me stuff and wanted me to “answer yes or no”. How the hell could I answer
”yes” or “no”? It’s too complicated. It’s a wildfire, one-way, or the other. They asked
me all kinds of goddamned stuff. “Did you write this?” “Yes, I wrote that. Sure, and I
meant what I said too!” The judge wasn’t any better. He says “You’re supposed to
answer ‘yes’ or ‘no’’. After six hours, they said, “O.K. you can sit down”. They bring
Buckey in and they ask him questions about the Eagles in Nova Scotia, and New
Brunswick. He was up on that topic, I wasn’t. They didn’t get too much off of him.
That night driving home from Boston, I had an attack of pain in my face. It was from the
trigeminal neuralgia. I would be in a store, shopping or somewhere, and “Bam”! I
would hit all of a sudden. People would think I was having a heart attack. They wanted
to know where my medicine was, or wanted to take me to the doctor. I but knew that I
would be all right, and that it would go away.
MR. GOETTEL: So you never knew when it was coming?
18
MR. GRAMLICH: No, I never knew when it was coming. It was just random. It would
happen pretty often when I was driving. I would have to pull over. I was afraid that I
would have an accident. Then I started going to the neurologists. They said they could
take the nerve out completely, but we can’t trust that, because sometimes the pain is
worse, and more continuous. I felt that was too dangerous, if you can’t get relief. I had
surgeries about every three months. And after a while the doctor told me that he had
done everything that he could, and that I should try a Dr. Davis. Dr. Davis had a different
procedure that he did, and it worked for about three months. The he said “I’ve done
everything that I can do. Try Dr. Steag, down in Boston.” I went there and he did a
surgery where they put a plate in between the nerve ending and the pain center of the
brain. That lasted about six months! He gave me Tegritall [a medication]. Which is
hard on your liver, and stuff. I had to take blood tests every week, because I was taking it
like hell. The doctor told me not to take more than I had to, to keep the pain down. He
finally said that he couldn’t do anything else for me. But he told me that there was a
“hell of a good” neurologist who had just come in to Maine. She’s from Germany, and
she had taught in Colorado. She is as smart as a whip. She knew what it was all about.
She asked me what I was taking. I told her I was trying to keep it down to fifty
milligrams a day. And she told me that I needed at least two hundred milligrams! She
put me on a really heavy dose of it. Since then, it’s been better.
MR. GOETTEL: Do you figure that all of this is due to the tension at the Pittson
testimony?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah, I had never had it before then. All of the doctors were
interested in my case. One guy, a Dr. Steag, wanted me to explain my symptoms to a
group of other doctors, and they all said that they were characteristic. And everybody
kind of [cringed] when you talk about that kind of pain, you do it unconsciously, even
when you are just talking about it.
MR. GOETTEL: But you beat the Refinery though, I guess.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. But the thing is, the Regional Director, Larson, was there
during the hearings and he told me that he thought that they treated me miserably, but
that I did a good job. After I got back here, they told me that they were going to give me
a bronze, Fish and Wildlife medal.
MR. GOETTEL: No kidding? That’s great!
MR. GRAMLICH: It was in the paper and everything. It took a lot out of me. But I can
stand most anything now, as far as pain goes!
MR. GOETTEL: Did you try acupuncture or anything like that?
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, I tried acupuncture. I tried everything. You had those needles
in your toes, and your hands, and your face. I kind of liked it. It felt kind of good. The
Chinese woman who gave it to me was a Doctor. She’d put one needle here, and another
19
needle there and then she’d hook up an electric charge to the needles. It felt so good
when the charge went through. It kind of eased the pain. I liked that a lot. But it was
expensive. I spent quite a few hundred dollars on it. It was one hundred dollars a
treatment. It’s only money. But it [The pain] always came back. The treatment was only
temporary. It would make it feel good for a couple of hours. I keep a record of the
money I have to spend by paying for everything with my VISA card. It averages out to
over five hundred dollars a month, just for the pharmacy. This month it was six hundred
and twenty-five dollars.
MR. GOETTEL: Wow!
MR. GRAMLICH: That’s all my spare change! It’s six hundred and some odd dollars
that I would otherwise be paying for a few days in a “home” somewhere. Oh Christ!
But that whole experience made me feel good about the Fish and Wildlife Service. And
it made me hate lawyers a little more than I always hated them.
MR. GOETTEL: That’s a funny thing about Maine: Of course, I worked here for ten
years at [unintelligible] but I always felt that one person could have a real affect on
conservation in Maine. You always felt like you were really doing something, that you
had the ability to so something.
MR. GRAMLICH: You had the respect from people, from the State people.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you know Jim Darsol? Is he still around?
MR. GRAMLICH: Oh yeah, he is still around.
MR. GOETTEL: He was a real character.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yes, he was. I saw a lot of his Duck boxes.
MR. GOETTEL: We were always lucky to have good relationships with the State here.
If nothing else, it was always positive.
MR. GRAMLICH: Yeah. The State was always the same. We were always working
together. Guys like Ken Anderson, who died recently.
MR. GOETTEL: Did he really. I didn’t know that.
MR. GRAMLICH: Me and him were pretty good buddies. We worked together. And I
worked with the Girl Scouts all of the time. I spent a lot of time with them. I got a big
plaque from them when I retired. We had seven or eight hundred acres that we worked
with them on, teaching about fire safety, and the safety of the kids. We did some
commercial harvesting and marking. We had a tornado come across the Girl Scout
Camp. It came across the lake, and there was a waterspout. It went into a farmer’s
cornfield. I was out in the yard with one of my boys and it looked like the cornfield was
20
up in the air, going around in our yard! We ran into a building that was an old chicken
house and watched it go over. It tore the hell out of the timber up in the Girl Scout
Camp. I had to talk to them to get the stuff out. It was all big trees. We had to get
somebody it there to harvest it. The harvester didn’t make a hell of a lot of money. He
had so spend it all on gas and moving it and stuff like that. They realized a few hundred
bucks from it. In the rest of the State, at the Girl Scout Camps, they started using a little
commercial timber harvesting. I talked to the girls all of the time, and told them what we
did in the Fish and Wildlife. I would try to help them get the right kind of shrubs and
tress to plant for the wildlife. Every year we would plant stuff for wildlife. Me and Sealy
used to drive all of the way down to the Conservation Camp and talk to people there.
That was on our own. Of course, Bill Hickling told us to “show the flag, and take
whatever time you have to”. He wanted us to stay in communication with the sportsmen
and the wildlife people. They used to have the Retriever Trials; I guess they still do, in
Washington County. I was a duck hunter, and I had a retriever. I used to use a lot of
retrievers. I used German Shorthairs for retrieving. I got my first one while I was in
Germany and brought it back. I kept “Germans” until I started using “Labs” [Labrador
Retrievers] because they swim better than the “Germans”. I almost lost a couple of
“Germans” when they went out so far chasing a bird. They couldn’t go as fast. A Lab
can go faster and catch them. I remember when one of my “Shorthairs” was out in the
swamp, the water was high, and she got on a stump. She was so tired of swimming, and
she just started to howl. When I left, she was so tired. I told her that if she wanted to
come, she would have to swim to me. She was just so tired; she looked at me and
howled. [Makes a dog-howling sound]. But anyhow, I used to always shoot the Retriever
Trials. It was either throwing Pheasants or Pigeons. They only have so many Pheasants,
and there are so many dogs. You don’t want to miss many. You didn’t want to let any
birds get away. I used to shoot with the Commissioner, Joey Buckman. He was a good
shot. We did all right. He used to tell me that he didn’t have anybody that he would
rather shoot with than me. We would cover each other at the trails when the pressure was
on. I met a lot of decent people doing that. I met Augie Belmont from Belmont Park in
New York.
MR. GOETTEL: I have heard the name.
MR. GRAMLICH: He had a Lab that he paid like nine thousand dollars for. It wasn’t
any better than our local dogs. But you know, you meet people that way, and let them
know what you’re doing in Fish and Wildlife.
MR. GOETTEL: Did you know Rachel Carson?
MR. GRAMLICH: No. I didn’t, but boy, she was great. She started the program, and
got rid of DDT.
MR. GOETTEL: I thought that you might have known her through your work with
Eagles and DDT.
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MR. GRAMLICH: I never knew her personally, but I always kept up with what she was
doing. There was a fellow at Patuxent, a hell of a good Chemist, I can’t remember his
name, and we had a good relationship. He would always include me in the papers that he
wrote for Wildlife Journal and stuff like that. All I did was get specimens for him. Then
when we worked with the State. They were spraying chemicals, and were concerned
about the effect the chemicals were having on the birds, in particular. We would shoot
birds, and collect their brains. Al Golden used to come to me. I don’t know how well
you know him.
MR. GOETTEL: I know him real well.
MR. GRAMLICH: Well, he’s a real funny guy. Him and the Black flies didn’t get along
too good. He always wound up looking like he had the measles from getting bitten. He
wouldn’t grease himself good with the repellent, or keep his shirt on. I always felt sorry
for Al. But he’s right up there. [With the best] It was an ideal way to work. I hated like
hell to even have to retire. The only reason I retired was. . . Pete would ask me, “For
Christ’s sake, when are you going to retire”? He wanted to know so he could move up!
MR. GOETTEL: That sounds just like him! [Laughing]
MR. GRAMLICH: I told him, “Sure as hell not before I’m sixty-two! I’d just as soon go
when I’m sixty-five”. He talked me into retiring when I was sixty-two. Now, of course,
he moved to town. He’s staying in Boston. I knew him a lot in Boston. I used to stay
with him sometimes at his house that he had up by Parker River. He had a dog that used
to hate me. He was a housedog, and he would growl and wanted to bite me all of the
time. I knew his family well.
MR. GOETTEL: Well, I really appreciate you talking to me, Frank.
MR. GRAMLICH: It was fun talking about everything! Goddamnit! I knew it was
something…{Remembers that he was going to offer Mr. Goettel something to eat or
drink]
MR. GOETTEL: Oh, that’s all right.
MR. GRAMLICH: I’m such a dope! [Walking away from recorder, interview finishes]